The Price This Ploughboy Pays

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Rich (Sparkle Pants) Lowry does not live on a farm. He did not grow up on a farm. He grew up in Arlington, Virginia, which is notable for its lack of soybeans, but famous for its abilities to grow lush crops of young pundits due to the native fertilizer that regularly spreads over the fields of Arlington due to its proximity to DC. His only experience with farming consists of planting the seeds of a dozen really terrible ideas in the minds of the gullible. Listening to Rich Lowry write about how deeply he is touched by the toil of the sons and daughters of the soil is like that time when Ann Coulter tried to convince us that Kansas City was her favorite city in America, or listening to Andrew Sullivan (back in the bad old days) yap about the betrayal of the Heartland by us members of the decadent bicoastal elite. Hey, y'all, if you like Omaha that much, just move there, OK?

Nevertheless, there was a commercial that ran during the Super Bowl in which some company attempted to sell its trucks by using a 35-year old speech given by the late Paul Harvey to the Future Farmers Of America, and Rich found himself moved almost to Palinwood by the old newshound's words. His imaginary overalls grew uncomfortable in a not-unpleasant way. He found himself compelled to share.

In the 4 1/2 hours of ceaseless spectacle that was Super Bowl XLVII - even the Roman numerals are excessive - there were only two minutes that made you stop and truly listen.

Are you kidding? Listening to the CBS football studio crew try to vamp through a 34-minute power outage was the alltime comedy shiz-nit. I thought Bill Cowher was going to blow his ACL trying to get to a verb. Jeebus, dude, have some fun.

The spot stuck out for how thoroughly un-Super Bowl it was. It's a wonder that CBS didn't refuse to air it on grounds that it wasn't appropriate for the occasion. It was simple. It was quiet. It was thoughtful. It was eloquent. It was everything that our celebrity-soaked pop culture, which dominates Super Bowl Sunday almost as much as football does, is not.

Yes, CBS is noted for turning down $3.4 million checks from major American corporations on the grounds that their commercials are too quiet and do not feature pole dancers or Korean guys riding pistachio nuts. CBS is a non-profit American television network.

All the fantastic glitz and sometimes hilarious vulgarity that define the events around the Super Bowl - the half-time shows and the ads - can't make up for a desperate poverty of expression. No one has anything to say, and if they did, they wouldn't know how to say it.

Notably absent from Rich's complaint is the now customary — and thoroughly militarized — pregame show, with the flyovers and "God Bless America" and the Anthem. Who invited this boring guy to the party, anyway?

Not Paul Harvey. His speech is a little gem of literary craftsmanship. It shows that words still retain the power to move us, even in a relentlessly visual age driven from distraction to distraction. Harvey picks up the story of creation: "And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said I need a caretaker - so God made a farmer."

What can I tell you? When he was a youth, Rich looked at the bromides stitched into his Gramma's souvenir pillows and read Shakespeare there.

In its pacing and its imagery, the speech is a kind of prose-poem.

If you understand neither prose nor poetry.

Delivered by Paul Harvey, who could make a pitch for laundry detergent sound like a passage from the King James Bible...

...and often did...

...it packs great rhetorical force.

As does the AFLAC duck.

Listening to it can make someone who never would want to touch cows, especially before dawn, wonder why he didn't have the good fortune to have to milk them twice a day.

Bollocks. You wouldn't have lasted an hour. Also, in 1978, American farmers were in open economic revolt at the consequences of their "good fortune." Let me correct my earlier statement. You wouldn't have lasted 10 minutes.

In short, it is a memorably compelling performance, and without bells or whistles, let alone staging so elaborate it might challenge the logisticians who pulled off the invasion of Normandy. That was left for Beyoncé. Some day a cultural historian will write the definitive history of the Super Bowl half-time and how it morphed from a showcase for the likes of the Grambling State University marching band to a platform for gyrating pop stars. (Michael Jackson started the trend in 1993.) Beyoncé dressed like she was headed for a shift at the local gentlemen's club, and put on a show that was an all-out assault on the senses. She was stunning and athletic, as well as tasteless and unedifying.

Says the man who thinks Paul Harvey is a poet and that Sarah Palin was a goddess. I mean, goddamn, who invited this guy, anyway? Maybe we should all move to the kitchen and watch the game in there.

(It really is time for conservatives to start ignoring pop culture again. If you're going to be a young fud until you're an old fud, just go for the gold. Pretend you don't know who Beyonce is.)

The Harvey ad was schmaltzy rustic romanticism, to be sure, but it celebrated something worthy. It was uplifting rather than degrading. It spoke of selflessness and virtue in moving terms.

He is ingenious. He can "shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire." He is hard-working. He "will finish his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon and then, paining from 'tractor back,' will put in another 72 hours."

You will note that the farmer is always a "he," of course. And the farmer's tractor-back will go undiagnosed and untreated because the farmer can't afford health insurance.

He is a family man. He bales "a family together with the soft, strong bonds of sharing."

Personally, Rich, I think there were a lot of folks sitting around the old homestead last Sunday night, as night fell across the pasturelands and the cows mooed lowly in the barn, who thought Beyonce's act was pretty damned hot. Edify that, ya ol' Green Room sodbuster, ya.